6 Tools to Manage Your Twitter Followers

Managing Twitter followers can become a time consuming task, taking time away from actually sending messages and growing your influence. Here are six tools to save you time.

Twepe

A little gem of a tool. Twepe, for a small cost, sends you a daily summary email of your Twitter follower activity, including new followers and lost followers, and alerts you immediately with an email of any mentions. The one alert it doesn't send is favorite tweets.

Twitter can do some of these things – but individually, so you receive an individual email for each follower gained (but not any lost) and any mentions. This can become overwhelming – personally I turn most Twitter notifications off and use Twepe instead.

Uses of Twepe include analyzing who you should follow back and spotting Twitter bots that follow you one day, and unfollow the next in the hope you have followed them back.

Usequitter

Similar to Twepe, but sending a weekly summary. Free now – with a planned paid version for multiple accounts.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk offers several tools. You can analyze and chart your followers by age, message volume and other metrics; view and sort all of your followers in a spread sheet format, allowing you to see the most influential or least active; search Twitter bios of your followers and their followers; compare followers and analyze their activity, and unfollow without leaving the site.

There are free and paid versions of the product, the latter with more features.

Manage Flitter

Most Twitter accounts will be following accounts that don't follow them back or are inactive. These reduce the ratio of followers to followed accounts and make the account look less influential in the eyes of many. Finding and removing those that have no value to you manually is a waste of time.

That's where Manage Fitter comes in. This free tool scans your account (once you've given it permission) and then lists all of your followers. You can then sort them by volumes of followers, accounts they are following, the number of lists they are in and the volume of tweets they have sent. There are also filter options for accounts with no photo, that aren't in English or are quiet or very talkative.

Once you've sorted your followers the way you desire – I suggest inactive, no photo and not following back as three to start off with – you can then tick and bulk unfollow accounts in one go.

If you want to know more about an account, including volume of followers, following and messages, this is available by hovering the cursor over the username. It's useful, but annoying at times – I'd rather see this next to each account on the page, as opposed to having to move the cursor to each listing.

Tweepi

Tweepi is another tool for finding people who don't follow you back and unfollowing them, with features including the ability to enter a username, sort their followers or who they follow and then follow some of those accounts, follow accounts on another member's list or paste in a list of user names and review those accounts. These features are useful for growing the list of accounts you follow in the hope of gaining followers back.

Some of the more advanced features - including some Manage Flitter offer for free - are paid-for. Personally I find a combination of the two works best without paying a fee, based on what I'm trying to achieve.

Contaxio

Contaxio works across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to varying degrees, determined by the functionality their individual APIs support.

Contaxio feels a more "serious" a product than some of the other Twitter tools out there - clean interface, support for multiple platforms and the ability to export data. As with most tools there are free and paid versions.

Features include the ability to analyze followers and your following and take action against those you select. There are a lot of features here worth checking out - the one "missing" sophisticated feature is the ability to see the overlap between profiles across networks, and added accounts on one platform you already follow on another.

The tool has free and premium versions.

Summary

Plenty of other Twitter tools are available - these are just a few that have useful features or have proved stable over time. No matter what tools you use, check what permission they request of your account before granting them, and, if you stop using them, log in into the Twitter site and remove their access. Watch out for tools that send a message from your account saying you are using the tool - there's normally a tick-box.

About the author

Duncan Parry, COO of STEAK, began his career in search in 1999 at Lycos, during the early days of the industry.

In 2002 he joined PPC engine Espotting and rose to the position of Agency Editorial Manager, working on campaigns for some of Europe's leading brands. He left Espotting in 2004 to work as a consultant in both paid and natural search, during which time his clients included publisher VNU's portfolio of UK IT, finance and recruitment websites.

In 2005 he reunited with ex-Espotting colleagues to found STEAK. His roles at the agency have spanned PPC, SEO and Insight, as well commenting and writing in trade press for the agency, and contributing to STEAK’s social presence.